If you’re a follower of my blog (ohhhh, hheeeeeyyyy!) you’ll probably remember this post: I am a woman. My best friend is a man. We don’t intend to get married, and it’s awesome. 

And you probably mostly remember it, because now we’re dating. See, here we are!

Gotcha! We were planning to date when I wrote that last blog post too.

JUST KIDDING.

For real, we had no idea. In fact, I would have said that we were fighting against the idea. At that point, we knew everything faulty about each other and didn’t have any interest in having to take care of that person and their messiness. Nice and selfish, right? Haha. And on and on that went, until finally, God was like, “Yo, stop fighting me, I’m GOD.” And now here we are.

If you’ve talked to either of us in the past 5 months, we’ll tell you that this has probably been among the most personally challenging times of either of our lives. Throw together two leader-like individuals who have been through quite the variety of hard things, undissected pasts, some deep fears, and lots of hopes and dreams, and you’ve got pretty much a ridiculous mess.

We’re generally pretty intense people. We both hate conflict, (we’re learning), and have dug through just about anything that could be dug through probably about 30 years before most couples dig through things. I’m totally kidding, I have no idea. But we analyze everything like 30 million times more than we need to. That much I know. We’re also learning about what to do and not do with that.

Seriously, this relationship has been a lot harder than either of us wanted it to be.

But, it’s also been very good for us. Because conflicting deep heart issues have proven that love is literally the only thing that can win. And I don’t mean like, the feelings “oooo, I love you and everything is butterflies!” I mean, the part of us that sits at Jesus’ feet and says, “I have no idea how anything will work. Could you make that make sense?” Two perfectionists trying to perfect the other person will kind of leave someone in that place.

What we’ve learned is that Romans 8:28 (God uses everything for the good of His children.) is indeed true. It’s all for the good. It’s all for healing. And it’s all to bring us closer to Jesus. Cuz I’m not perfect. And neither is he. But that’s the point. We can’t navigate something perfectly that’s made with imperfect people. We need Jesus. And then even though we don’t know the future and we don’t know how to understand stuff, we have Jesus, and He has shown us that there still remains nothing we can do without His guidance. That makes the hard worth it.

…because love wins.